The present embodiments relate to the field of Electronic Design Automation, and more precisely the field of hierarchical system design and analysis, including, but not limited to, circuit simulation.
Electronic systems designs, and in particular semiconductor-based designs can be extremely large and complex systems. Such complexity is enabled by advanced semi-conductor processing techniques, which allow systems of enormous intricacy to be physically realized on tiny pieces of semi-conductor, and/or printed circuit boards. As a result of this ever-increasing complexity, and severe market pressures, designers of such systems are forced to use electronic design automation (EDA) techniques such as hierarchical design approaches, design/block re-use, and rules-based systems in order to be able to cope with the vast scale of the solutions they are trying to implement.
Major factors in the hierarchical circuit design complexity are the vast number of blocks of components, the diversity and number of properties that each component may have, and the rules that govern how the property assignments will interact in the hierarchy.
The present embodiments provide a hierarchical, rule-based, general property visualization and editing method, system, and computer program product for circuit design. One embodiment includes configuring a set of supported properties based on an analysis tool, setting values for a first set of selected properties, calculating values for a second set of selected properties, and viewing the set and calculated values.
One method of analyzing a hierarchical circuit design, includes configuring a set of supported properties based on an analysis tool, setting values for the properties using an interface tool, outputting a configuration file from the interface tool, and analyzing the circuit design based on the configuration file.